Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Data Mining: A Survey

With the fast development of various positioning techniques such as Global Position System (GPS), mobile devices and remote sensing, spatio-temporal data has become increasingly available nowadays. Mining valuable knowledge from spatio-temporal data is critically important to many real world applications including human mobility understanding, smart transportation, urban planning, public safety, health care and environmental management. As the number, volume and resolution of spatio-temporal datasets increase rapidly, traditional data mining methods, especially statistics based methods for dealing with such data are becoming overwhelmed. Recently, with the advances of deep learning techniques, deep leaning models such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) have enjoyed considerable success in various machine learning tasks due to their powerful hierarchical feature learning ability in both spatial and temporal domains, and have been widely applied in various spatio-temporal data mining (STDM) tasks such as predictive learning, representation learning, anomaly detection and classification. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on recent progress in applying deep learning techniques for STDM. We first categorize the types of spatio-temporal data and briefly introduce the popular deep learning models that are used in STDM. Then a framework is introduced to show a general pipeline of the utilization of deep learning models for STDM. Next we classify existing literatures based on the types of ST data, the data mining tasks, and the deep learning models, followed by the applications of deep learning for STDM in different domains including transportation, climate science, human mobility, location based social network, crime analysis, and neuroscience. Finally, we conclude the limitations of current research and point out future research directions.